Literary Birthday – 11 June – Alan Gurganus

Happy Birthday, Alan Gurganus, born on 11 June 1947.

Alan Gurganus Quotes

1. Novelists don’t start life till turning forty. By that measure, as an artist, I am a blushing twenty-six-year-old. I’ve only just begun… (via)
2. Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them. (Facebook Post)
3. Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they’ll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you’ve changed into that very simple shape. (Facebook Post)
4. Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty. (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All)
5. There’s a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page. (A-Z Quotes)
6. Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape. (A-Z Quotes)
7. I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of ‘The New York Times.’ It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread. (Brainy Quotes)

Alan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His work, which includes the award-winning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina. Gurganus first trained as a painter, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. During a three-year stint onboard the USS Yorktown in the Vietnam War, he turned to writing. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his mentors were Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Gurganus has taught writing and literature at Stanford, Duke, Sarah Lawrence, the Michener Center at the University of Texas-Austin, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Award and a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.

Source for photograph: Alan Gurganus’ Website

by Amanda Patterson

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